How to configure BE3600 over multiple sites

Our company is looking to puchase 2 BE3600's. Beside HQ, we have 7 remote sites. HQ has 6 servers with a total of 3.5 TB of data, and each remote site has 1 files server, each with approx 500 gb of data. We were going to put one of the BE3600 at HQ, and another at site 1. Then dedup the data from HQ to site 1. Now mgt has decided they would like to add all sites in the mix. SInce the BE3600 is only limited to 5.5 TB, is this a feasible way to do it? Currently all sites have tape drives and we are wanting to get away from daily tapes. We would only run tape backups once a month for retention purposes. What is the best way to do this? Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

Since you are going to put an appliance on each site, you should do the backups on each site to the local appliance. You then share the dedup folders of each appliance with the other and then use optimised duplication to duplicate the backup sets from one appliance to another. In other words, do this

1) do your backup of Site A to Appliance A at Site A

2) duplicate the backup from Appliance A to Appliance B at Site B

3) Similiarly do the same thing with your backups at Site B.

Optimised duplication will only send the changed data blocks from one appliance to the other, thus minimising the bandwidth requirements. Depending on the amount of data that you have, the 5TB of disk space can be sufficient because the data is deduped, i.e. they are not stored twice.

With this setup, you would have backups of each site duplicated to the other site, thus giving you better redundancy.

For your monthly tape backup, if you have the backup window, then you might want to just do a backup straight to tape. If you duplicate your disk backups to tape, they would first have to be hydrated, i.e. un-"dedup"ed, and this might take a long time.